Appropriate hearing

Published: Sunday, August 4, 2013 at 08:00 AM.

Protesters have vowed to camp out at the state Capitol until a special legislative session is convened to repeal, or significantly curtail, Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.

They are in for a long, long wait.

Neither a special session nor repeal is going to happen anytime soon — nor should they. The law confirms a fundamental right to self-defense, polls indicate it remains popular with the public and there is insufficient political momentum to radically change it.

However, that doesn’t preclude the law from being examined to ensure it’s being properly enforced.

House Speaker Will Weatherford, a strong supporter of the law, last week announced that the Criminal Justice Subcommittee will hold a hearing this fall to evaluate the effectiveness of “Stand Your Ground.” In an op-ed published in the Tampa Tribune, Weatherford said the panel must address three questions: Does the law keep the innocent safer? Is it being applied fairly? Are there ways we can make this law clearer and more understandable?

This is an appropriate move, albeit one that seems guaranteed to duplicate much of what the state’s “Stand Your Ground” task force already has done. Last year, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Gov. Rick Scott appointed a blue-ribbon committee to study the controversial law (even though George Zimmerman never invoked it as a defense). After holding public hearings around the state, the task force in February released its final report, where it concluded the law should remain.

Still, the consensus recommended some changes. These included asking the Legislature to provide a statutory definition of “unlawful activity” to clarify when individuals can claim “Stand Your Ground,” and giving law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the judiciary more training in self-defense laws to ensure their uniform and fair application.

Protesters have vowed to camp out at the state Capitol until a special legislative session is convened to repeal, or significantly curtail, Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.

They are in for a long, long wait.

Neither a special session nor repeal is going to happen anytime soon — nor should they. The law confirms a fundamental right to self-defense, polls indicate it remains popular with the public and there is insufficient political momentum to radically change it.

However, that doesn’t preclude the law from being examined to ensure it’s being properly enforced.

House Speaker Will Weatherford, a strong supporter of the law, last week announced that the Criminal Justice Subcommittee will hold a hearing this fall to evaluate the effectiveness of “Stand Your Ground.” In an op-ed published in the Tampa Tribune, Weatherford said the panel must address three questions: Does the law keep the innocent safer? Is it being applied fairly? Are there ways we can make this law clearer and more understandable?

This is an appropriate move, albeit one that seems guaranteed to duplicate much of what the state’s “Stand Your Ground” task force already has done. Last year, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Gov. Rick Scott appointed a blue-ribbon committee to study the controversial law (even though George Zimmerman never invoked it as a defense). After holding public hearings around the state, the task force in February released its final report, where it concluded the law should remain.

Still, the consensus recommended some changes. These included asking the Legislature to provide a statutory definition of “unlawful activity” to clarify when individuals can claim “Stand Your Ground,” and giving law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the judiciary more training in self-defense laws to ensure their uniform and fair application.

The report’s appendices included minority recommendations that went further in amending the statute, such as allowing courts to look at evidence that could disprove the claim that a defendant was in imminent peril.

The Legislature, though, failed to act on any of these recommendations.

The House Criminal Justice Subcommittee is likely to hear many of the same criticisms and recommendations the task force did. Will anything change?

In the eight years since SYG became law, there has been a crazy quilt of cases that stretch the boundaries of what the law considers justifiable self-defense. The hardest involve identifying who the initial aggressor was — especially if one of the only two witnesses to the confrontation is dead.

Is there too much subjectivity in the statute that results in substantially different applications among law enforcement? Or are police, prosecutors and judges unequally informed about how it should be applied?

Florida in 2005 was the first state to adopt SYG, but since then more than 20 other states have followed suit. Have they experienced similar confusion and controversial results? One way to find out would be for the Legislature to adopt the task force’s recommendation that it fund a study of such variables as race, ethnicity in the application and fairness of the law, including a statistical comparison with other states, and submit a report by 2015 with periodic updates.

Holding hearings in the fall is preferable to calling a special session now because the raw passions of the Zimmerman verdict are still palpable. It’s never wise to pass legislation in the cauldron of emotion, and it’s especially dangerous to craft statutes in response to one complicated incident (“hard cases make bad law”).

Kudos to Weatherford for taking the right approach and asking the appropriate questions. Even the protesters welcomed the news, calling the hearings “a critical first step.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fort Walton Beach, who will chair the hearings, apparently has heard enough. He told the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Friday: “I don’t support changing one damn comma of the Stand Your Ground law. It would be reactionary and dangerous to make Floridians less safe to pacify uninformed protesters.”

Hopefully there will be more open minds — on both sides of the issue — when hearings convene.